A Classical Liberal Blog on Political Science, Economics, Philosophy, Law, and More

Archive for the ‘ideologies’ Category

Ross Tilchin writes up the results of a Brookings study on libertarians in the Republican Party, citing some of the research I have done here on Pileus. The main point Tilchin argues is that libertarians are at a severe disadvantage nationally within the Republican Party, relative to competing constituencies like moderates and the religious right. However, see also David Kirby’s rejoinder at Cato@Liberty. He argues that the Brookings study seriously underestimates the proportion of libertarians in the general population and in the Republican Party. The debate seems to turn on how strictly one wants to operationalize the concept “libertarian.” If weak libertarians are included, there are many more of them. Regardless, I echo Kirby’s appreciation of growing scholarly attention to the political role of libertarians in the U.S. polity.

For more on figuring out where libertarians are, also check out an interesting paper on two-dimensional ideological preferences at the congressional district level by Warshaw and Rodden. (Americanideologyproject.com is an interesting site for data on one-dimensional preferences at the subnational level in the U.S.)

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The decades roughly separated by Reagan’s 1980 victory and the financial collapse brought a greater respect for markets and growing interest in libertarianism. The financial crisis, in contrast, led to a rejection among many of market-oriented doctrines and a revival of Keynes (in Robert Skidelsky’s words, it marked “The Return of the Master”).* According to Michelle Goldberg (h/t Marginal Revolution) it has also brought renewed interest in Marx. One quote:

After the financial crisis, “you didn’t need to be Karl Marx to see that people were getting kicked out of their homes,” says Gessen. And privileged young people—particularly the kind of who are inclined to read and write essays about political theory—haven’t just been spectators to immiseration. Graduating with student debt loads that make them feel like indentured servants, they’ve had a far harder time than their predecessors finding decent jobs in academia, publishing, or even that old standby law and are thus denied the bourgeois emollients that have helped past generations of college radicals reconcile themselves to the status quo.

I am not certain that one can generalize from Goldberg’s piece. While my experience may not be representative, it suggests that she is on to something. During the 1990s, there was e a growing fascination among a subset of my students with the works of Ayn Rand. Once the bottom fell out, the appeal of objectivism dissipated and I have seen a growing curiosity with Marx’s basic arguments regarding the intrinsic flaws of capitalism and greater support for socialism. Given the power of postmodernism, my guess is that students will bypass classical Marxism and head toward the New Left’s take on Marx (e.g., Marcuse’s synthesis of Marx and Freud) or some combination of Marx and postmodern theory. Whether this can be translated into a political program remains an open question.

This raises some interesting questions: Has the Great Recession undermined the demand for classical liberalism? Will the financial collapse be the event that shapes the ideological orientations of a generation? What are the political implications?

*Note: the empirical record does not support the contention that the Reagan administration marked some wholesale return to the market—the rhetoric was rarely translated into policy. Similarly, the empirical record does not support the argument that the financial collapse was simply a product of a zealous embrace of deregulation and free markets. Nonetheless, these are the popular interpretations and they likely carry a good deal of weight among those who do not have the time or inclination to delve deeply into political economy.

I have just posted a couple of my working papers to SSRN for those who are interested. They are as follows:

“Public Policy and Quality of Life: An Empirical Analysis of Interstate Migration, 2000-2012” Abstract:
Individuals and households choose their political jurisdiction of residence on the basis of expected income differentials and jurisdiction-specific characteristics covered by the general term “amenities.” In addition to fixed characteristics like climate and terrain, amenities may include public policies, as in the well-known Tiebout model of migration. Do Americans reveal preferences for certain public policies by tending to migrate toward jurisdictions that offer them? This article tests whether state government involvement in fiscal policy, business regulation, and civil and personal liberties more often reflects an amenity or a disamenity for Americans willing to move. As identification strategies, the article estimates spatial, matched-neighbors, and dyadic models of net interstate migration for all 50 states, covering the years 2000-2012. The evidence suggests that cost of living, which is in turn strongly correlated with land-use regulation, strongly deters in-migration, while both fiscal and regulatory components of “economic freedom” attract new residents. There is less robust evidence that “personal freedom” attracts residents.

“Civil Libertarianism-Communitarianism: A State Policy Ideology Dimension”Abstract:
This paper investigates the existence of a second dimension of state policy ideology orthogonal to the traditional left-right dimension: civil libertarianism-communitarianism. It argues that voter attitudes toward nonviolent acts that are sometimes crimes, particularly weapons and drugs offenses, are in part distinct from their liberal or conservative ideologies, and cause systematic variation in states’ policies toward these acts. The hypotheses are tested with a structural equation model of state policies that combines “confirmatory factor analysis” with linear regression. The existence of a second dimension of state policy essentially uncorrelated with left-right ideology and loading onto gun control, marijuana, and other criminal justice policies is confirmed. Moreover, this dimension of policy ideology relates in the expected fashion to urbanization and the strength of ideological libertarianism in the state electorate. The results suggest that the libertarian-communitarian divide represents an enduring dimension of policy-making in the United States.

In his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, economist Mancur Olson argued that over time, stable societies accumulate “distributive coalitions,” narrow special-interest organizations that complexify social life and burden the economy with overregulation and opaque forms of wealth redistribution. The notion that distributive coalitions are more often bad than good for economic performance, at least when they are not sufficiently “encompassing” to internalize the costs of inefficient redistribution, is pretty well accepted, but Olson’s thesis that political stability and the passage of time are the most important determinants of the number and power of distributive coalitions has been more controversial. One of the chapters of his book is an empirical test of the hypothesis on the 50 states. Olson finds that states settled earlier have higher rates of unionization and lower growth rates (in the 1960s and 1970s), except the former Confederate states, which “benefit” from the disruptive legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

I am skeptical of Olson’s explanation for the growth of distributive coalitions, but his research does contain a kernel of truth. States that industrialized (note) early often show up on the bottom of economic freedom indices and usually have lower-than-average growth rates even today. Why is that?

To answer the question, we have look back at the social context of 19th century industrialization. The U.S. started out as an overwhelmingly rural, farming country. Industrialization populated the cities. Industrialization advanced first in those parts of the country that were unfit for export agriculture, benefited from high tariff walls on manufactures, and had a policy of free labor: southern New England, New York, and New Jersey. However, resource discoveries in the West also brought urban growth to California.

In 1900, the most urbanized states, by far, were Rhode Island (88.3%) and Massachusetts (86.0%). Then came New York (72.9%), New Jersey (70.6%), and Connecticut (59.9%). Pennsylvania (54.7%), Illinois (54.3%), and California (52.3%) were not far behind Connecticut. All of these states, with the possible exception of Pennsylvania, are now recognized as “deep-blue,” solidly Democratic states. Most of these states were relatively free for industry in the early 20th century, but they also boasted the strongest labor unions and most severe class conflict. These highly urban states became “proletarianized,” leading today to a strong concentration of Democratic votes in their metropolitan centers, according to Jonathan Rodden and other scholars.

As late as 1957, New Jersey was an example of a low-tax business haven. State and local taxes from all sources as a percentage of personal income stood at just 6.3% in New Jersey that year. Delaware had the lowest tax collections in the country, at 4.6% of income. States at the high end included Vermont (9.1%), which pioneered the state income tax, North (9.7%) and South Dakota (9.0%), and Oregon (9.0%). These states remained rural for a long time in part because prairie populism and Yankee progressivism yielded fiscal and regulatory policies that deterred investment. The South’s repression of blacks through Jim Crow kept their institutions “extractive,” to use Acemoglu and Robinson’s term, and their comparative development level low.

Nowadays, urbanization does not tend to produce proletarianization. Not many Americans are employed in manufacturing any more, nor are many private-sector workers covered by collective bargaining agreements. Thus, economic freedom has lost its self-undermining character. In the 1800s and early 1900s, economic freedom fostered industrialization, which brought on proletarianization, which led to a pro-regulatory public ideology, which then led to reversals in economic freedom. Now, late industrializers are not necessarily becoming less economically free. Indeed, there is a slight, positive correlation between present-day state urbanization rate and the Ruger-Sorens measure of economic freedom, controlling for left-right ideology.

States like California and New York are living off the accumulated capital of past economic freedom. Now that the political tide has turned decisively against economic freedom in those states, they are shedding people and jobs and growing more slowly than the rest of the country. Places like the Dakotas, Carolinas, Oklahoma, and Texas, which have reversed their anti-market policies of the past, represent America’s dynamic economic future.

Support for liberty is a lot like support for GMO-free food. If you survey people, they’ll tell you how much they love it. They might even tell you it’s the most important thing in the world for them. But make them pay $0.50 extra to have it and they’ll choose the next product on the shelf. A few pay extra for the GMO-free tags, but if you’d probably be disappointed if you launched a GMO-free brand based on a survey of how much people claimed to hate genetically modified foods.

Absolute differences across American states are perhaps not large enough to make it worth moving. But if that’s the case, what are we to make of libertarian activism in the less-free states? It’s exceptionally unlikely that even the most effective activist in New York could move the state more than a point or two in the ordinal rankings, but that same person could take an oil job in North Dakota and move from worst to first while working there to help make North Dakota even better.

The Honours thesis I’m supervising this year will examine the price of liberty. The international ranking above gives a nice cross-sectional snapshot of differences in liberty across countries. Some of the measures can be extended backward in time. My student, Chris Read, is going to add these measures to international migration data to estimate the elasticity of migration flows to measured liberty and compare that elasticity to things like expected income differences across countries. Most people are messy pluralists; I’m really curious to see how things here pan out. Hopefully by the end of it, we’ll be able to say “A unit increase in civil liberties, all else equal, has about the same effect on inbound migration as a $X increase in median income.” That X will be close to a revealed preference measure of the price of freedom.

Later this week, I’ll post reassessing some of my Kiwi-enthusiasm in light of the post-earthquake policy experience. I’ve been pretty disappointed with how things here have panned out. We are not as far outside of the asylum as I had thought.

* I count myself as a messy pluralist of this sort too; I’m not trying to disparage it! Freedom matters, other stuff matters too.

Why do “red” states that tend to vote Republican in presidential elections take more federal money than do Democratic-leaning, “blue” states? This surprising correlation between ideology and federal dependence has been often noted (see for instance here, here, and here). Indeed, this fact seems to be trotted out whenever we hear “what’s the matter with Kansas/Connecticut” arguments from the left/right, respectively. Are conservative states hypocritical and liberal states self-abnegating, or is there some deeper explanation?

First, let’s take a look at that correlation. In the chart below, I’ve plotted each state with federal grants to state and local governments in that state, as a percentage of personal income, for fiscal year 2007-8, on the Y axis, and percentage of the vote for Obama, McKinney, and Nader in the 2008 election on the X axis. The line through the points represents the least-squares line of best fit. As you can see, there does indeed appear to be a negative relationship between liberal ideology and acceptance of federal grants.

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As many readers already know, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University just released a new study I’ve coauthored with Texas State political scientist William Ruger, Freedom in the 50 States 2011: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom. It’s the second edition of a study first published in 2009. The new edition updates and expands the data, ranks the states, and examines some correlates of economic and personal freedom.

I’ll try to blog a few of the findings from the study here in the near future, but in this post I wanted to explore something more in the vein of traditional academic political science, using the same data. (The data for the study, and to which I refer here, are available to the public at statepolicyindex.com.) When we try to understand how states differ systematically from each other in the mixes of public policies they have chosen, we have at our disposal a statistical method known as factor analysis. Factor analysis allows us to extract from a large number of variables a small number of dimensions – new variables that express meaningful correlation across policies. For instance, if states that have strict gun control laws also tend to have high cigarette taxes and lax abortion laws (which is true by the way), factor analysis could tell us that because of the high correlations across these three variables, a single variable can explain much of the variance in all three policies.

The dimensions that emerge from factor analysis of state policies are referred to as “state policy ideology.” We could think of them as regime orientations, ways in which different state governments have typically approached a wide range of public policies. The most important dimension of policy ideology is, unsurprisingly, the liberal-conservative, left-right dimension. Policy-liberal states tend to have, for instance, (more…)

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About Pileus

Pileus is a group of scholars who examine public policy and philosophy in light of our respective disciplines. We differ in many ways but share a commitment to liberty and personal responsibility.

This blog is hosted by The Fund for American Studies, an educational nonprofit (www.TFAS.org). TFAS is not responsible for the content of the blog and neither endorses nor condemns any of the content posted.

What is a Pileus?

In ancient Rome, a pileus was a felt cap given to slaves upon receiving their freedom. Since then, this simple cap has been a powerful symbol of liberty.